The American Bakery Company Baked to Perfection and its Digitalization Process. Between Apps and Baking

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - General grade: 13 ESCP Europe Business School - Campus Paris language: English abstract: The purpose of this paper is to outline the legal issues of BTP's (Baked to Perfection) market entry in five European cities. Therefore it will concentrate on four major question. First what contracts BTP will need to conclude? To answer this question it is necessary to look which contracts are required for both launches: the mobile app and the bakery outlets. For the app launch BTP will need to interact with app developers customers bakeries and app stores. For establishing bakery outlets it is important to define a franchise contract and vertical agreements. Second how BTP can best protect its brands in the EU? For this purpose it is necessary to introduce different types of intellectual property protection. Which intellectual property rights like patents trademarks or copyrights are relevant for BTP and how can they be applied? Third the paper will give an overview about the regulatory requirements that are necessary for operating the app lawfully and successfully. In this chapter it will be shown what actions need to be taken regarding the app itself its distribution and customer data. Finally the paper will describe how BTP can sell its new European business. The assumption here is that BTP will create a subsidiary which can be sold in the future. Baked to Perfection (BTP) an American bakery company is performing well in two business areas. Mainly it is operating in a (niche) bakery market as a traditional supplier of high quality bakery products which are also often gluten free and/or organic. One success factor of its products is its own Perfection brand. Even though this business area is delivering good numbers in sales ($200 million) and gross margin ($30 million) the new CEO Freddie Doe decided to adopt BTP's business model by following the digitalization. In the last y